Essay about London Economy Report

Submitted By am2210
Words: 2507
Pages: 11

Has London become a more or less unequal city over the last 30 years?

Executive Summary
London has become one of the most attractive cities in the world and in the 1970s, when the Bretton Woods was established; London was named the financial city of Europe (Cobham, 2012; Story and Walters, 1997; Fichtner, 2007). Most of London’s financial establishments were doing business in the capital. The attractions in London have made people want to move to the city and it has made the London economy an interesting topic to discuss. This report covers the aspects that make the London economy, such as labour market, financial sectors and many more as well as analysing the London economy thoroughly by looking at industries and individual producers that make up the London economy. This report also discusses how London has become unequal in the past thirty years, examining data and graphs to support this view as well as my own personal effort to gather evidence in support. It attempts to provide real and clear evidences with justifications to how London economy has improved with the booming financial sector, but also analyse the housing and labour market whereby figures have fallen in the last thirty years.
London as unequal city
Doughty (2010a) stressed that wealth inequalities in London has widened with many rich and wealthiest people in the region getting richer. Professor Danny Dorling noted that London has become the biggest unequal city in the Western world and it shows how London has kept the elite in the city rich whereby the elites have used the financial market gains to take an advantage of the poor people in London. “The top 10 per cent of people living in London have on average wealth worth £933,563 while the poorest 10 per cent are on average worth £3,420 - some 273 times less” (Doughty, 2010a; Ramesh, 2010). This shows how London is continuing to become unequal because the wealth differences shows how the rich controls London in many ways while the poor continues to strive in a divided city. The income inequalities in London have increased significantly and Professor Dorling added that it has been like this for the past eighty years, and London is living like the slave trading days (Doughty, 2010a). This is a big statement to make by Professor Dorling and if so, it shows how London has been divided in regards to income. The inequalities of income in London have been compared to cities such as New York and Sydney whereby Ramesh (2010) claimed that these cities have wealthy people but not as much as the wealthy elites in London. However, as the income inequalities continues to soar in London, the life expectancy between rich and poor people have increased because data shows that rich people living in Chelsea and Kensington are expected to live until they are eighty-eight years and nine months whereas poor people in various parts of London life expectancy has stalled (Ramesh, 2010; Doughty, 2010b).

The structural change in London has decreased the size of sectors in the city whereby they have been plenty of adjustment made to change the London economy and by time, the structural change has had an impact on the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors in London. These sectors have had a significant impact on the UK economy in a whole because in 1971, the secondary sector was bigger compared to 2008, when the secondary sector shrunk significantly, but the tertiary sector in 1971 and 2008 stayed the same even though the financial sector had expanded rapidly since the notion of globalisation embodied with the neo-liberalism ideology. To further support this claim, I questioned an ex-owner of a manufacturing company that used to be based in England. He further alliterated that the decline of manufacturing in England was due to rising costs and pressure from cheaper products in other countries and therefore could not compete. He went on to say that due to these reasons, the UK as a whole has seen a shift from